Mark Reviews Movies: THE CONTRACTOR

The Contractor, Paramount Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 31, 2022

J.P. Davis' screenplay for The Contractor begins as a terse and tough look at people left behind by a system upon which they relied, driven towards questionable or outright terrible choices they feel obligated to make. There are no real heroes in this story—only desperate people trying to justify what they're doing with ideas about what heroism looks like. As long as the illusion lasts, they'll continue doing such things.

Such tough-minded and disillusioned notions cannot last in a story such as this one, which revolves around a protagonist who otherwise is basically decent and moral, a top-secret mission that eventually uncovers a conspiracy with some clear villains, and plotting that almost feels obligated to give us some fights, shootouts, and chases, instead of dealing with the tricky morality of its scenario and characters. This is a movie that holds some early promise, but it's soon dismissed for a routine and simplifying plot.

Our potentially compromised protagonist is James Harper (Chris Pine, who's quite good at slightly subverting some all-American-hero type in his performance), a member of the Army Special Forces who has served multiple tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. His career is on hold at the moment, on account of a second severe injury to his knee. He wants to get back to active service, not only because of a sense of duty, but also—and more practically—because the bills at home are past due. There's a succinctness to how director Tarik Saleh uses montage to quickly establish the stakes and routine of the setup.

When the Army discovers non-prescription drugs in James' system, his determination to get back into the fold instead results in an honorable discharge. In the process, he loses his pension and medical benefits, too. James' wife Brianne (Gillian Jacobs) is comforting and supportive of him and about the family's situation (The couple also has a son). She worries, though, that her husband might follow in the footsteps of his father, a veteran who more or less indoctrinated him into a military mindset before leaving behind everything, or the members of James' unit who have committed suicide after similar treatment.

Davis and Saleh imbue this early section a sense of quiet despair and uncertainty. James could take a job with a private security firm, but the notion of being essentially a corporate mercenary isn't appealing. Meeting up with his former superior officer Mike (Ben Foster) provides another option. Mike is currently working for Rusty (Kiefer Sutherland), who runs an off-the-books unit for matters of national security, and while Rusty keeps the nature and purpose of those operations a secret, James can't pass up on the sizeable paycheck being offered to him.

From here, the movie gradually abandons its focus on these characters, who become pawns in decisions and actions beyond their understanding (our own, too, for that matter). It also gradually eliminates the moral fog of what seems to be potentially dangerous situation that, from a personal perspective, arises from conflicting needs. To wit, the plot has James traveling to Berlin in order to keep tabs on a scientist (played by Fares Fares), who came upon hard times for himself and his family, finding himself apparently funded by the leader of a terrorist organization. James, Mike, and the team have to find the scientist's research and, then, wait for orders about what to do with him.

The connection between James' situation and the scientist's feels intentional and, on a thematic level, rather tantalizing. That idea comes to a rather abrupt end, though, and while the new through line of James realizing that he might be involved in a shady or downright awful program gives the material a cynical bite, those ideas remain beneath the surface of repetitive and predictable plot.

Basically, James has to uncover the truth of the scientist's work, figure out what that truth means about Rusty and his operation, and navigate his way through all of that while being pursued by some tactically incompetent but seemingly omnipresent threats. Action doesn't entirely take over this story, as James has a crisis of conscience and, upon meeting a contact (played by Eddie Marsan) who has spent more than a decade in isolation in a safe house, faces the possibility of an existence of living with guilt and regret.

The action, though, certainly does seem to be the story's major purpose. There's a pair of shootouts, one in the woods and the other in the streets of Berlin (that becomes a chase along a river and a fistfight within a drainage system), and the most notable takeaway is how choppily edited and haphazardly staged these sequences are (The former trying to cover up the latter, but the way in which characters seem to suddenly change position between shots definitely highlights how uncertainly the sequences are assembled). The action scenes that follow it are in a similar vein.

More to the point, though, the action of The Contractor serves as an easy way out for the filmmakers. They set up some difficult questions about heroism, duty, and what people are willing to do to survive, but in the end, the movie is of the mindset that a big, climactic standoff is the only answer that matters.

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